Tag Archives: board Game Geek

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Welcome to Creature college Update 13

In homage to the late great Terry Pratchett, “If complete and utter chaos was an escaped rabid hamster with little pointy teeth then I’d be the sort standing next to a hamster wheel dressed as a carrot trying to tempt the hamster into a tiny box muttering “Here Squeaky, here boy””. We’ve definitely been in overdrive this month. Three cons, updating the website, finishing stretch goals, filming play through videos, running competitions and working with our artist, designer and media studio to get ready for our Kickstarter. My wife has hardly seen me, the children have formed their own self-ruling proto-civilization on the top floor of our family home and given my bleary eyed state at work my colleagues have adopted the mistaken belief that I spend my evening crawling bars sampling the heady Cheltenham nightlife as an elderly Lothario.

So what has actually been happening? Well with less than two months to our Kickstarter now it’s been all hands to the rigging to try and get everything ready.

Website

Well for those who haven’t already noticed we’ve completely revamped an updated the website. Partly so we could add new features but mostly because the old website looked like it had been created by a five year old with a bunch of multi-coloured crayons. The new website is a big improvement, it has play-through videos, our rule book, details of other projects and even a shop where you can buy some of our natty Creature related merchandise. We only have t-shirts available in the shop so far but that will change over the next few weeks as we get closer in to the Kickstarter. You can take a look at the new website at http://www.happyottergames.com/.

Reviews

We’ve now sent sample games out to all of our reviewers and there are some really well known names on the list. Keep an eye on the website for details of the reviews as they become available.

Stretch Goals

All our stretch goal art work is finished and we’re currently working on our extra stretch goal items with our fabby printer Wingo Games. We’ll publish more details on these as they become available but take a look at these cute little suckers!

Most of these guys have already been named by our friends over at The Boardgame Group but there’s still one naming competition left so keep an eye out and join in!

Play-through Video

We know that you’ve been dying to find out more about how Creature College plays so we’ve filmed this neat little video to take you through the game. It’s hard to see the cards so at some point we may film a top down view as well. You can take a look at the video on the front of our website http://www.happyottergames.com/.

We’d love for you to go take a look at our page, vote on our page and become a fan! We’d love you, and hug you and call you George ( unless you’re a girl in which case we’ll call you George).

Ninja Snails

We’re currently working on a game to be released after Creature College. We don’t plan on being a one-game-wonder! It will be a few months yet but we can give you a sneak peak at our concept art! Here is our Hashimoto Clan Leader. Ninja Snails is a card game that we think will have two decks of just over 100 cards in total. The aim of the game will be to defeat other ninja houses to collect koku. The person at the end of the game with the most koku will win.

Well that about wraps it up for this addition of the Newsletter. We’ll be running more fabby competitions and all sorts of other good stuff will be happening in the run up to the Kickstarter so keep an eye out and thank you for all the support you’ve given us as our community. We couldn’t do this without you!

So you’ve finished and play-tested your proto-type and you’re ready to look for a printer. Getting your game printed can feel like a bit of a mine-field and depending on who you ask you’re going to get some wildly varying quotes for printing. Five of the first things to bare in mind are:

You’re going to want prototypes and these are best done with the printer you’re going to be using to produce the game. This way you get to catch places where they may not have understood what you want up front

If you’re going to use traditional distribution to get your game into stores then you’re going to want to have a very low base cost as retailers look for very large margins on games (up to and over 50%)

The printer you choose should be experienced at producing games and have the technical ability to realise your dream. Make sure that you look carefully at what they’ve produced before and if possible…get references

They should be easy to communicate with and responsive. If you ask a company for something and it takes two weeks to get a response (to a simple question) you should consider walking away. When you’re on tight deadlines the last thing you want is an unresponsive printer

You’ll need them to be flexible at times. You need to feel like your printer is coming with you on your boardgame journey and they’re willing to work with you to make your game work

So where to print? If you run a google search for game printing you’ll get a raft of companies coming up that print games. For early good looking prototypes Game Crafter is a good first stop but if you’re going to require non-standard pieces or large print runs at a low cost per game then you probably don’t want to use them for your production run. If you live in Western Europe or the US you’ll find a lot of great printers. The benefits of printing in country are:

You can go and sit down with the printers and brief them in person (In the US this could involve a plane flight 🙂 )

You don’t have to worry too much about transportation

Depending on where you live and where you’re transporting to import duties and VAT cease to be so much of a problem for you

People speak your language both literally and figuratively

So given all these great benefits of printing in country, why do so many games companies (even Kickstarters) print over seas. In the first instance there is only one over-riding reason; COST. Simply it’s cheaper per unit to print overseas than in either the US or Western Europe. The difference in cost can be staggering, quotes for my game in the UK were coming in at around $25 – $35 for 1000 units, my base cost in China is closer to $12, even with transportation costs this doesn’t come anywhere close to $25. Prices in Eastern Europe (Poland/Czech) aren’t necessarily quite as good although you can get some excellent prices and you have the benefit of working with a company within the EU. So bearing in mind the huge financial benefits to printing overseas, what are the downsides?

You need to find a reputable printer who is easy to work with and both of these can be a challenge if you’re not fortunate

Language can be hard if the printer’s contact staff don’t have good English

It can be hard to assess quality of materials unless your printer is willing to send you pictures or samples

You can feel a bit disconnected from the process

You may have both VAT to pay (reclaimable in the UK if you’re VAT registered) and import taxes (Games are 0% rated in the UK and come under the import code 9504908000)

So how can you lessen the impact of these downsides? Find yourself a great overseas printer. This is down to word of mouth recommendations for people that have used them. I was very fortunate to hit upon Wingo Games almost straight off the mark. They were kind enough to provide a couple of references one of whom had been another Kickstarter project. The references were good so I asked them to quote on the game. I was immediately impressed by the level of contact that I received from Wingo, despite the fact that they company turns over millions of dollars a year my contact, Ivan (they all use western names to make themselves easier to interact with), made me feel like I was Wingo’s only customer. I have contact with Ivan maybe every couple of days and he’ll regularly drop me a line just to ask me how things are going. His English is close to perfect.

They were very flexible with me for my sample games which was very much appreciated as samples are very expensive. Typically a printer will have to include the same set up costs for a big print run in the costs for your sample games. This means that some of the quotes that you receive for samples can seem astronomical so flexibility here is very much appreciated.

The next thing that impressed me was the quality of the sample games:

Here is Creature College in all its glory. You can’t feel the quality of the materials but suffice it to say (and I fully accept that this is a little bit weird) I sometimes just run my hands over the box to feel the finish! I was very impressed with the quality of work from the thickness of the box cardboard and design of the insert straight through to the print quality in my rule book.

Finally you want to feel that your printer is a real partner. As you can see from the title picture Wingo Games has shared a stall with me at conventions and we’ll be at Essen together in the fall. I don’t heap praise on a partner without good reason but Wingo Games are a vital piece in the potential success of Happy Otter Games and Creature College.

I hope this little guide has been useful. If you’re interested in my experiences and just want to chat about your own project then feel free to drop me a line at orhan@happyottergames.com. I’m happy to put people in touch with Wingo but you can also contact them yourself at sales06@wingogames.com.cn.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to Creature college Update 12

Sheesh, well it seems like a age since I managed to update everyone! So what’s been happening since our last update. Our big news was that our sample games arrived from China and our fabulous printer Wingo did an awesome job. The sample games look terrific and they arrived just in time for UK Games Expo where we managed to meet a bunch of our great fans and play some really fun games of Creature College. It’s also let us send copies out for review and we currently have two reviews pending with some more planned.

We’re also now firmly in launch mode with a bunch of stuff happening in the background to get us ready for Kickstarter in late September. We’re working with our friends across at Ironbelly Studios in Montreal on our Kickstarter video, preparing the artwork for our stretch goals, working with our designer on our Kickstarter page, setting up distribution networks and basically figuring out the 100 other small details that will hopefully ensure that we’re “Not at home to Mr. cock-up” at any point during or after our Kickstarter campaign. 🙂

We’ve also been planning how we will share a stand at Spiel 2015, Essen with our fantastic printer Wingo which will be slap bang in the middle of our Kickstarter Campaign!

We went a little crazy with competitions in May/June. Not only did we give away our customary monthly competition prize (Kimberly Snelgrove) and ran three impromptu competitions on The Boardgame Group, but we also gave away over 40 prizes in our UK Games Expo competition.

As always we’d like to give a shout out for a couple of other Kickstarter initiatives that we think are worthwhile. Currently both are a little ways from their funding targets but they’re both really great projects. The first is Foe Hunters by Larry Lembke of Spellforge Games. The second is “For the Love of Spock” run by Adam Nemoy, Leonard Nemoy’s son who is trying to get the funding for a documentary about his fathers life in time to have it ready for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek next year.

Sample Copies of Creature College

We believed it was very important for us to have full production quality copies of Creature College to send out for review and to play with at conventions so we’ve worked very hard with Wingo to make it happen. Below you can see what the game actually looks like and what we will deliver to Kickstarter pledges.

UK Games Expo

UK Games Expo was fantastic. We got to meet so many great people who really made the show for us. We ran many demo games and Creature College was very well received by everyone who played a game. It was great to meet all the brilliant folks from the Boardgame group, Katerina Demeanour, Ty Voyce, Declan Noonan, Matt Prowse and Dan Voyce for dinner and games on the Saturday night. A huge thank you as well to all our friends who pitched up at the stall to give us support with the best game of the weekend almost certainly being with Dan Macmillan, Garry Hewitt and the Northampton crowd. Also many thanks to Leon from Wingo who helped make it a great show for us and was kind enough to gave away dice to everyone who came to our stand! Perhaps the biggest star of the show for us though was Ty Voyce who made us a whole pile of *branded cupcakes*! Thanks again Ty…they were scrummy!

The Kickstarter Video

We’re working on our video with the great folks over at Ironbelly Studios in Montreal and we can give you a sneak peak into some of the work that we’ve been doing with them to prepare for our Kickstarter.

Please back Foe Hunters!

Our friend Larry Lembke from Spellforge Games has launched his Kickstarter for Foe Hunters. This is a great game with some stellar reviews so go and take a look at it and help Larry make his funding target!

Players: 2-4 Duration: About 90-120 minutes (The rules say 40-80 minutes but we’ve never managed to finish a game in that time)

Age Range: We’d say about 10+ (The rules say 13+ – it is a deep game so I can understand their rating)

So this was another game I’d been dying to try. I’d heard good things about it from a number of friends, and people seemed to be raving about it on the boards as well…but did it live up to the hype? Five Tribes is produced by Days of Wonder, the same company that brought us the hugely successful Ticket to Ride series, Small Worlds and Memoir ’44 so I can perhaps be forgiven for having very high expectations of Five Tribes. A couple of weeks back I purchased a copy from Amazon and planned to unleash it on our Monday night games group, however on the Saturday night I had the opportunity to play the 2-player rules with a friend who had a couple of hours to kill. I was pretty much hooked from the first five minutes, clever game mechanics coupled with beautiful production and great re-playability make this a great acquisition for any one’s games collection. I had actually managed to persuade people to play it four more times by the end of games night! Five Tribes will set you back about £36($52) if purchased on Amazon.

The Unpack

For a game costing only £35 Five Tribes has undeniably beautiful production. You notice almost immediately the vibrancy in the colours, the nice finish on the cards and the large number of quality wooden playing pieces. A great deal of care and attention has been spent making this game look and feel really good. I especially like the little cloth draw string bag for the preponderance of meeples, not strictly necessary given the game play but a very nice additional touch. The crenelated edges on the cardboard coins give them a rather nice unique feel and the artwork on the cards is attractive. Another nice touch is the scoring pad; the largest I’ve seen for a game but that does make it very easy to use especially if like me your arms have been getting successively shorter in the last few years. The rule book is well laid out and easy to follow and the card game references, the large mats in the picture, a luxury as they serve only to help you with quick look-ups during the game. Did I feel I received my money’s worth in the box? Definitely…I would happily have paid another £5-£10 for this quality of game.

The Trope

You have arrived in the Kingdom of Naqala to find it’s Sultan deceased and the five tribes in disarray. You have to cleverly manoeuvre the tribes into supporting you so that you can defeat your opponents and become the new Sultan of Naqala. To do this you must capture regions of Naqala, influence all powerful Djinns, gain influence through manipulation of the tribes, build palaces and oasis, and ultimately become a very rich man/woman. The trope works well and although the game mechanics would work equally well in multiple different genres you do get the feeling that the author has tried hard to make everything in the game fit comfortably into the backstory. This is a good instance of backstory definitely adding to the game.

The Game Play

Five Tribes is played on a board constructed of 30 region tiles. The region tiles are placed randomly at the start of the game. Each has a score and a special ability. The fact that the board is different every time definitely adds to the re-playablility of the game. Each tile has three meeples randomly assigned to it from the five tribes of Naqala (merchants, viziers, elders, builders and assassins).

You bid for who moves first and this can be key if you can see a particularly good move on the board. Bidding involves paying for a position on the player order board, but don’t pay too much unless it really benefits you as your hard earned cash translates directly into victory points at the end of the game!

The central mechanic of the game involves how you move the meeples around this board. On your turn you get to take all of the meeples from any one tile and move them in a line either horizontally or vertically (or both) leaving a meeple on each tile you move through until all your meeples are gone. You have to colour match on your last tile, in other words there must be a meeple of the same colour as the last meeple in your hand when you place on the final tile in your run. When you place on the final tile you remove all the meeples of the colour of the last meeple you placed.

So in the above example we took a blue, green and white meeple from the top right hand corner and left one meeple on the (5) tile another on the (15) tile and placed the final white meeple on the (4) tile. There was already a white meeple there so we were able to remove both white meeples.

Once you’ve moved there are three things that you can then do:

Activate the power on the tile which allows you to buy resource cards, Djinns or buildings.

Claim the tile by placing one of your camels on it if you removed ALL of the meeples (i.e. they were all one colour)

complete the action for the meeples you removed

The meeples all allow you to complete different actions:

Elders (white) – these give you points at the end of the game and enable you to buy Djinns

Assassins (red) – Assassinate meeples and can help you claim additional tiles

Merchants (green) – allow you to claim resource cards

Visiers (yellow) – pure vp at the end of the game

Builders (blue) – allow you to claim gold during the game

In Five Tribes gold and victory points are the same thing, You can earn victory points by collecting resource sets, djinns, tiles, gold, buildings and meeples. These all tally up at the end of the game to determine a victor. It’s worth mentioning the Djinns as these have special powers on them that can effect your strategy significantly during the game. I found it was really worth buying djinns but you then had to play to their special powers to gain the full benefit. So there is one djinn that multiplies the gold bonus of your viziers but it’s pointless unless you collect viziers. You get the picture. I guess the point here is don’t ignore them they’re a great strategy to play.

Summary

Five Tribes is a “tour de force”; it has deep gameplay, requires you to play multiple strategies to win, pits you in very interactive tactics with your opponents and delivers more than enough mind bending for even the very seasoned gamer. In the games I’ve played with friends so far it has had a greater quotient of “hang on a moment I need to think” than pretty much any other game I’ve played. Given the relatively short time it takes to read and grasp the rules, finding such depth of gameplay is a welcome surprise. The cost is more than reasonable given the quality of production and the fact that this is a very good game. It’s rare that as a game designer that I come across a game and honestly think that there is nothing I would do to improve it but Five Tribes gains that honour and hence there’s only one way I can really rate it.

So I first saw Trench a couple of months ago on one of the Facebook board game groups and initially although slightly intrigued by the geometry and elegant Modernist design, I didn’t really give it a second thought. Over the next few weeks I’ve seen a steady stream of good reports about the game culminating with Larry Cruz and Josh Tolpa from The Boardgame Group both ordering a copy from Rui. Well as I knew that both Josh and Larry wouldn’t be interested in the game if there wasn’t something to it, I contacted Rui who was kind enough to send me a copy. Rui is an Indy games developer living out in Portugal and the postal services being what they are between here and Portugal, the game took a little while to arrive. It was definitely worth the wait though!

The Unpack

The first thing you notice about Trench is that the game’s production is really slick. The board and pieces are plastic but don’t suffer from it. There’s a nice feel to the playing pieces and because of some careful choice of materials they move with just enough resistance on the board to give a sense of gravitas to your move. The white and black playing pieces both come in their own draw string bag so the contents of the box look very tidy, which if you’re border line OCD like me you’ll probably find very pleasing. The rules are in several languages but they’re well laid out and bar the odd error in the English, are easy to follow allowing you to start playing within about 15 minutes.

The Trope

The theme behind Trench is perhaps a little unlikely given the games’ very aesthetic design. It’s an abstract simulation of trench warfare in the first world war. The pieces represent a general, colonels, captains, sergeants and soldiers that are setup in a formation reminiscent of classical Roman diamond shaped army deployments. The line down the centre of the board represents a trench and the board has mainly black or mainly white squares representing the two sides in the conflict. When I first saw the board I was a little distracted by the fact that the colouring of the pieces did mean that they merged into the board a little. Reading further in the rules I learned that this was exactly what Rui had intended! The board and pieces are designed that way to make it harder for your opponent to distinguish what you’re doing…camouflage!

The Game Play

Like chess the board is eight squares by eight squares with the “trench” running horizontally across the board from corner to corner. The squares on one side are mostly black and on the other are mostly white. Your pieces are laid out in a diamond shape in one corner starting with one general, two colonels, three captains, four sergeants and six soldiers. Each has a pictogram on the bottom showing the directions it can move in but as you might expect the larger pieces can move in increasingly more ways than the smaller ones. No piece in Trench can “jump” other pieces. The pieces also increase in the range that they can move and hence the range that they can attack from with the general moving five squares and the soldiers moving one square. This rather nicely simulates range in warfare. Pieces take each other by moving onto an occupied square.

Now we come to the game mechanic that really makes Trench.The trench itself. Pieces that end their move in the trench are said to be occupying it and this gives them several interesting powers. Pieces occupying the trench cannot be attacked by the opposing player from their side of the board. The opposing player either needs to get pieces into the trench or outflank their opponent attacking the trench from behind. Pieces in the trench don’t need to stop their movement once they’ve taken the first piece they encounter on moving out of the trench, but can carry on to take more pieces if they have the movement to do so…in other words they can “break out” of the trench. Just like in chess where the battle is for the centre of the board in trench it’s all about holding and exploiting the trench.

The game ends when one or other player has eliminated all his/her opponent’s pieces or after 50 moves (25 by each player). The pieces are then counted each one having a points value and the winner is the player who after two complete games has the most points. If it’s a draw then a third game is played in sudden death mode where the first player to 40 points wins.

Summary

Trench has the feel of being a game that is simple to learn but takes a lifetime to master. I think it could have general consumer market appeal beyond the gaming community but it’s still a mind bender of a game for a keen gamer. The simple rules belie a depth of game play and strategy, whilst the skilled aesthetic design make this game a joy to play. If i have any criticisms they would be that the English rules, although easily decipherable, could do with one or two corrections and it would be good to have some way of keeping track of how many game turns you’d played given the 50 turns restriction on the length of the game. However, these are small concerns given the overall playability of the game. I honestly hope that Rui manages to find a good international distributor for this great game.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our news letter if you haven’t done so already and you’ll be entered into our monthly “Win a board game of your choice” competition. Just click here.

Welcome to our Week 10 News Round Up!

So it’s been quite a week this week. Mostly it’s consisted of preparing files for our printer Wingo in China. This basically entails writing lots of instructions, checking through all the files and ensuring that we haven’t made any of those silly little mistakes that you notice later and think to yourself “Why didn’t I check everything through more carefully?” The last piece to this particular puzzle has been integrating all the feedback on the rules which was finished this morning. Now we’re in full publicity mode of UK Games Expo which happens at the end of this month. Mike Legan, our brilliant artist has been working on poster art which we’ll share later in the Newsletter and we’ve been working on some freebies to give away at the show. The other exciting piece of news is that it looks like we’re going to launch a little earlier than we originally thought. You’ve probably seen the odd piece where we’ve mentioned November but it now looks like we’ll be launching over the Essen Games Show in October!

We also have a winner for our April competition. Frank Auge won our $150(£40) prize and chose Cthulu Wars as his prize which is currently winging it’s way towards him! We’ll post pics of Frank with his prize as soon as we’re able to. We also published our first game review of Greenbrier Games’ Ninja Dice. You can read the review here.

Finally our friends Arthur and Veronica Critchfield launched their game Gruff on Kickstarter yesterday. We were able to drop in on their Skype launch event and have a chat with Brent whilst Veronica drew the most amazing Mutated Monster Goat mural in the background. We just want to say one thing:

Mutated Monster Goats….come on people! Joking aside this is a great game with fantastic artwork and a strong well play tested design. At only $25 for the bottom tier it’s one of the cheaper Kickstarters to back. It’s almost funded already. This will be a Kickstarter that you’re very pleased you’ve backed.

UK Games Expo, 29th – 31st May

So we will have stand 7 in the Library at UK Games Expo this year. We’re going to be playing the first sample version of Creature College, running competitions, collecting for charity (hopefully) and generally having a great time. We’ve started an event on Facebook and if you’re on this side of the pond (i.e. In the UK) we’d love to meet you and have a game!

Just look for our poster…you won’t be able to miss us!

Ninja Dice Review

We love Ninja Dice as a great little filler game for the end of an evening or to take with you on holiday. You can get Ninja Dice from Green Brier games. Read the review here.

Back Gruff on Kickstarter!

This is a game that needs to get backed and then some. Not only does it have Mutated Monster Goats in it, reason enough to back it in our books, but it has fabulous artwork, a great design and compelling game-play. But don’t take our word for it, take a look at the Kickstarter video and the review video below.

Recently I’ve been playing Ninja Dice from Green Brier Games with my kids quite a lot so I thought it was about time I wrote a short review. Ninja Dice was a Kickstarter launched in 2013 and it rapidly achieved and then smashed its funding goal.

The first thing to notice about the game is that it’s production is lovely and very well thought through. The dice are large enough and the printing clear enough so that you don’t have to peer too closely to see the symbols, the little plastic Koku (Japanese coins) look and feel right and to top it all off it comes in a natty little square Ninja pouch!

To play the game the players in turn have to beat the “house”, in other words by throwing the black dice one person creates a “house of obstacles” that the next person clockwise (the active player) has to beat by rolling five white dice. To beat the house the active Ninja has to roll symbols that counter the house’s security. So..the house may have rolled two guards, four servants and two locks….the active Ninja would need to throw enough fights, sneaks or keys to match in order to beat the house. If the Active Ninja beats the house they get a koku for every dice they’ve beaten, an extra koku for beating the house and still another koku if they do it by sneaking past everything (no fighting). The active player can continue rolling any combination of dice until he either beats the house or the other players drive him out of time.

Now here’s the clever bit…where the dice fall matters! So when the active player throws his white dice all the other players also roll a single die with coloured symbols. If an arrow turns up this symbol has a horizontal line in front of it and any player with dice in front of that line can have a Koku stolen from them unless they’ve thrown an arrow catch symbol.

There is also a Kanji symbol on the white active player dice that has the ability to multiply white dice that fall in front of it making it easier for the active player to beat the house.

Each of the die with coloured symbols on it has an hour glass symbol on one of the sides. Whenever one of these is rolled it is taken out of play and placed next to the house. All the players roll their dice at the same time as the active Ninja either rolls or re-rolls. Once the house is beaten or all the coloured dice have rolled an hourglass the round ends and the house and Active Ninja dice pass clockwise. Note that if all the hourglass symbols come up before the Active Ninja has beaten the house then the round immediately ends and the Active Ninja gets no Koku!

Once everyone has been the Active Ninja the turn ends and the next turn begins adding a sixth dice to the house which makes it harder to beat. A seventh die is added in the third turn.

This is a great space filler game…it takes about 20 minutes to play and is good fun but don’t try and overthink it! If I had any criticism at all it would be that if you don’t like luck in games then Ninja Dice may not be your thing. The game also has a “locations” expansion and a Kage Masters expansion (recently on Kickstarter) neither of which I’ve tried yet but they apparently add a lot to the game! So my recommendation 4/5, go and buy this game as a great little end of evening game.